Intel D975XBX (Bad Axe)

[djt]

It’s been a while since I visited over here on the Intel side. I built an AMD FX-55 / nForce4 SLI setup last spring and ended up abandoning my 875P/3.4GHz P4 setup that was probably the best chipset that have ever owned. That same 875P setup is still running in a relative’s machine after three years of use and three video card upgrades.

I have to say that I have been impressed by the performance of my AMD setups but I miss the completely trouble free days that I experienced in the past with my Intel setup.

Right now I’m almost at a cross roads with one of my AMD setups. I have been trying for months now to get a Cross Fire setup running properly. After giving up on an Asus A8R-MVP about two weeks back I purchased the new A8R32-MVP Deluxe. The new board gave me nothing but trouble also (a new BIOS released late last week was supposed to resolve the issues) and I ended up sending it back.

I am very impressed with the 975X chipset and its Cross Fire compatibility. I’m almost tempted to sell off my FX-57 and grab one of the Intel processors and give the 975XBXLKR a try. I also have two ATI cards (1900 Cross Fire Edition / 1900XTX) sitting here with an X-Fi Fatality sound card that I would be combining with this motherboard.

What are your thoughts on this?

[Sandog]

Originally Posted by emgarf

My BadAxe system parts arrived yesterday... so far, the following parts are assembled:

BadAxe (duh) - BIOS updated to latest (0618, I think)
Pentium D950, stock cooler
(x2) OCZ Gold Series 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Unbuffered DDR2 667 (PC2 5400)
eVGA Geforce 7900GTX 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 850 SSI power supply
(x3) Caviar SE16 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Benq DW1655 DVD-RW

...all in a Lian Li PC-G70B case.
This is a full tower case, here's a link - http://www.lian-li.com/Product/Chassis/S_C_PC-G70.htm
The case is set up with intake fans at the front bottom and on the rear panel next to the processor.
Exhaust fan is on the side centered over the card slots. Power supply also has its own exhaust fan.
Both intakes and the exhaust fan are all 120mm.

So far, so good as the system boots into BIOS and will boot from CD/DVD, but I have a couple concerns:

1) With the system displaying the BIOS hardware monitoring screen, temps stabilize at:

Processor - 67C
Zone 1 - 47C
Zone 2 - 42C

Fan speeds are:

Proc - 1500
Side exhaust (aux) fan - 1500
Front intake - 1000
Rear intake - 1000

This seems a little warm for a system just sitting in BIOS, although it meets Intel's thresholds of 75/65/65.
I'm concerned that these temps will climb during typical PC activity, although the fan speeds are apparently being kept fairly low by the MB.
Won't be able to evaluate 'typical activity' until after the OS and drivers are installed.

2) The RAM is 667MHz DDR2 CL 4-4-4-8, but the BIOS defaults to 533MHz 4-4-4-10 with that memory installed.
Manually changing the BIOS timing to OCZ's advertised timing seems to cause no ill effects,
but as noted above I'm just entering BIOS at this point and not really running anything. I think one of my
Linux bootable CDs has memtest on it; maybe I'll try that.

Anyone see a problem with the manual timing change?


Thanks in advance for any advice / comments,
emgarf

Very nice setup. The CPU and mobo will run the hottest in BIOS. Those are actually not bad temps. My computer will spin up the case fans really fast in BIOS which is something they never do in Windows. I hit the highest temps ever on my Koolance display (44C) when in BIOS which the CPU is way up there.

I would get the 955EE in April but I have to sell the 840EE. I am trying now for the 4th time. It does not look like it will sell and I may have to keep it until Conroe.

[Sandog]

Originally Posted by djt

It’s been a while since I visited over here on the Intel side. I built an AMD FX-55 / nForce4 SLI setup last spring and ended up abandoning my 875P/3.4GHz P4 setup that was probably the best chipset that have ever owned. That same 875P setup is still running in a relative’s machine after three years of use and three video card upgrades.

I have to say that I have been impressed by the performance of my AMD setups but I miss the completely trouble free days that I experienced in the past with my Intel setup.

Right now I’m almost at a cross roads with one of my AMD setups. I have been trying for months now to get a Cross Fire setup running properly. After giving up on an Asus A8R-MVP about two weeks back I purchased the new A8R32-MVP Deluxe. The new board gave me nothing but trouble also (a new BIOS released late last week was supposed to resolve the issues) and I ended up sending it back.

I am very impressed with the 975X chipset and its Cross Fire compatibility. I’m almost tempted to sell off my FX-57 and grab one of the Intel processors and give the 975XBXLKR a try. I also have two ATI cards (1900 Cross Fire Edition / 1900XTX) sitting here with an X-Fi Fatality sound card that I would be combining with this motherboard.

What are your thoughts on this?

I think I remember you, welcome back.

I have found the D975XBX board to be as stable as any Intel board. You would have an awesome system with those video cards that should work fine in Crossfire setup. You would be restricted to using the last PCI slot (only 2 available) for your Audigy card which probably is not a problem for you. The D975 appears to run Conroe but later on it might not be the best choice for Conroe. It runs the Preslers fine if you get a current processor but you will need a big power supply for that Crossfire setup. I wouldn't go with less than 600W with a 950 or 955 Presler.

[emgarf]

Originally Posted by Sandog

Very nice setup. The CPU and mobo will run the hottest in BIOS. Those are actually not bad temps. My computer will spin up the case fans really fast in BIOS which is something they never do in Windows. I hit the highest temps ever on my Koolance display (44C) when in BIOS which the CPU is way up there.

I would get the 955EE in April but I have to sell the 840EE. I am trying now for the 4th time. It does not look like it will sell and I may have to keep it until Conroe.

I should be able to stress the system more tonight - if anyone's interested, I'll report on the 'typical use' temps.

Any thoughts on the memory settings?

Cheers,
emgarf

[JimTram]

Interesting - I wonder how many Oregonians are in fact displaced Californians?

Originally Posted by pointreyes

Not when you're an Oregonian.

Oregonians hate California. It's like a quiet Civil War between the two states.

emgarf, see you have the 7900GTX. Those temps do seem high but maybe your bios is setup to make the proc run as quiet as possible? If so that could cause part of the issue. My 830 idles at 55 and I'm using the stock HSF but my case has that huge crossflow fan opening and 2 x 120mm exhaust fans.

[pointreyes]

Originally Posted by JimTram

Interesting - I wonder how many Oregonians are in fact displaced Californians?

Too many and hence the reason for the war. Popular example: Another bad driver in the rain today - must be a stupid Californian. Was not a problem until they came up here.

Being from Maryland and marrying a "native" Oregonian, I'm exempted from this abuse (even though I moved up here from Sacramento).

[Intel_User]

Sure, caches would help but besides that memory latency will matter. Hence, why A64's are so much faster per clock compared to AXP's.


If optimizations are required to have Conroe perform that good, that SUCKS. If programmers properly optimize for Pentium 4, we'll see top performance from that CPU. However there are different degrees of optimizations, and most will not do it very well.

Pentium 4 had potential, it was really never realized either, IMO. If Core needs optimizations, that spells trouble for Intel. It's current performance with programs that matter most, optimizations don't matter now.

[Intel_User]

Mate this is a point of conjecture about Intel rigging the numbers, but in my eyes why would they risk it?

The decisions coming from both Intel(and AMD for that matter), sometimes don't make sense.

Think of it. Why can the doubled pumped Fast ALUs in P4 can do 4 instructions/cycle, but Trace cache can only do 3, effectively crippling it?? Does it make sense??

Same thing with rigging the numbers. Sure it doesn't make sense for us why they would risk it, but its very plausible.

[Intel_User]

Hmm. More detailed reading of Anand's comment says that the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU. Looking at how vastly the CPU is improved, there isn't much reason to doubt numbers, but the sentence bothers my pro-Intel part lol.

If its true, and so far I haven't seen Intel rigging the numbers in any of their benchmarks, it can only improve.

[DeusExMachina]

Question: who did the modifying? ATI? Or was it done inhouse?

DXM

[Intel_User]

Question: who did the modifying? ATI? Or was it done inhouse?

DXM

You judge: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2713

"(the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems)."

Whoever did it doesn't really change anything. Since using antiquidated BIOS for FX didn't change from new BIOS, probably the recognizing the CPU won't either and I am just too paranoid lol.

Looking at Core architecture says that the performance delta should be there and the final version has higher chance to increase performance further. However I thought that even though its likely that CPU will be good in workstation/server apps, media encoding, I couldn't see how gaming performance can be improved that much. Perhaps games nowadays are all using SSE/SSE2. Maybe that's why P4's became acceptable for games.

[TQ]

Originally Posted by pointreyes

Not when you're an Oregonian.

Oregonians hate California. It's like a quiet Civil War between the two states.

I understand. I'm a Texan and we're simultaneously loved, hated and feared by the rest of the the U.S.
...and the world for that matter...heh...

The 7900GT looks like it's the new super performer+price champ. I'm really looking forward to building my first new, ground up system in over two years with a Conroe, a 9-whatever-will-support-Conroe and a 7900GT.

I'm also looking forward to The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Only five days from today.

[Intel_User]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30290

"WE HAVE seen many AM2 socket CPUs. Most of them are running at 2.4GHZ and are showcased with DDR 2 800 memory. That is the only way to show any kind of performance difference from the DDR 400 based existing 939 CPUs.

The guys that ran some benchmarks on those machines confirmed that you can expect three to five per cent performance increase and that is about it. AMD claims that those engineering samples are the final revision so you should not expect more of the performance incensement."

Interesting. I was right from the beginning that DDR2 won't do much to AM2 because of latency. It's so bloody obvious looking at why 915/925 performed not so much better compared to dhttp://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30290

"WE HAVE seen many AM2 socket CPUs. Most of them are running at 2.4GHZ and are showcased with DDR 2 800 memory. That is the only way to show any kind of performance difference from the DDR 400 based existing 939 CPUs.

The guys that ran some benchmarks on those machines confirmed that you can expect three to five per cent performance increase and that is about it. AMD claims that those engineering samples are the final revision so you should not expect more of the performance incensement."

Interesting. As expected.

[Sandog]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30290

I knew it. About the same performance increase as Intel received. I thought it would be around 5% for AMD though but surely not more than 10%. This is basically not worth upgrading for and puts AMD in the same boat as when Intel migrated to DDR2. A lot of AMDer's will stick with DDR1 systems for longer. Bad month for AMD (hehehe).

[TQ]

Originally Posted by Sandog

Bad month for AMD (hehehe).

Heh...boo-freaking-hoo...